The 3d-secure stuff is a web-based API. I don't know the details on what the DDOS affected, but if it took down everything on Mastercard's servers, then any website which has opted into using that enhanced security tool would have either failed to make the payments or fallen back to the less secure (and far more typical) approach of skipping that step completely. Assuming sites that a) handle their own payments and b) use that extended auth system were built right, it should have degraded fairly gracefully. Of course with CC processing it's never that simple and it depends on a dozen other things, but in theory the payment networks should have been relatively unaffected.
You certainly can try, but unlocking (to my understanding) requires reprogramming parts of the GSM chip's firmware. Jailbreaking is merely getting root access. Which allows you to unlock the phone, but you still have to know what you're doing - and if you screw it up, the phone is probably dead for good even if the rest of the device remains functional.
Even if you CAN unlock, do you really want to? In the US, your only frequency-compatible option is T-Mobile, and you often lose 3G capability too. It's probably much more useful internationally.
Unless your product is catering to developers, your customers don't give a damn what the code that powers your product looks like (and even if your customers ARE developers, they probably still don't care). Unless your implementation is at least an order of magnitude better than the competition, the first one with traction wins. Look at Twitter, and the dozens of twitter clones that came out shortly thereafter - none of them went anywhere because they didn't have the users, but I'm sure they were implemented better (since Twitter exposed a lot of the original problems). And yet bit.ly ended up killing off tinyurl.com, because it's a) 45% shorter to start and b) offers analytics on link usage which really did make it an order of magnitude more useful than what it replaced.
At least, that's the case for startups and new ideas. When your idea is to win the Netflix challenge and hit the million dollar payoff, then it's 100% down to implementation.
In case you haven't been to an airport (or anywhere else with a complete disregard for reasonable privacy expectations) recently, it's actually an extremely valid concern which makes perfect sense. To suggest or believe otherwise is, at this point, downright ignorant.
That's not to say it WILL happen, but it is absolutely a legitimate concern. I would be very surprised if they can't be used as a black-box solution (e.g., the last 30 minutes of footage can be pulled) from the start. From there, it's easy to mandate the ability to broadcast signals ("for automating insurance claims", etc). Conspiracy theories and slippery slope arguments actually become quite reasonable with the precedents we've been setting recently.
I'll just apply to one of you, since you're all basically saying the same thing, and since you showed up in my inbox first, it's you: 1. If you're turning on your high beams so often you know how to do it off the top of your head, you either live in the sticks or you're doing it wrong. From your comment, you live, or grew up in, the sticks. Fine. I didn't.
Are there any cars for sale where turning the highbeams on is something other than pushing or pulling the left stick (the one that controls your directionals)? I've seen some inconsistency in turning on the low beams (and wipers, for that matter), but that should be literally the first thing you figure out how to do before driving an unfamiliar vehicle.
Also, if "a tree in the middle of the interstate" isn't visible in time for you to stop, you're overdriving your headlights. It's a well-defined term meaning exactly what you've described. If you're at point X and your visibility is to Y (generally from headlight coverage, but it also applies to fog), you are driving unsafely if you cannot bring your vehicle to a complete stop before Y. Unless your headlights are in absolutely terrible condition or you have appallingly bad reaction times, 65mph will not put you in that situation.
This is all basic Driver's Ed material. No offense, but it really does sound like you're not capable of safely operating a vehicle under normal circumstances.
I can get fake evidence on film just as easily as I can get it on a CCD. Just print out the retouched version and take a photo of said print. This has been pointed out several times already though I think others are overcomplicating matters, claiming that you need perfect alignment and lighting. But as long as people don't know what the original looked like (and if they do, the fake won't work), none of that matters as long as a viewer can't tell it's a photo of a photo instead of an actual scene.
Somehow I imagine this is significantly harder to do with consoles that aren't cartridge-based, unless there's some serious bandwidth going to those accessory ports.
Not to mention death benefits, and the much less measurable but more important intangible value of a human life.
Of course, something that makes killing the enemy more efficient doesn't *quite* help with that unless you blindly follow the "us vs them" mentality (and to not do so is treason, I'm sure), but that's what you have to do if you're measuring costs to America.
In absolute costs, of course. Sounds like it will be capable of taking out enemy combatants in one or two well-placed rounds. Compare that to a bunch of lobbed frags, several clips of ammo and some luck, or whatever else the equivalent may take. Never mind the cost of replacing a soldier that would have been killed in an ensuing firefight (just to completely dehumanize things). So relative to the alternatives, it may actually be cheaper - or, at least, not wildly more expensive.
Seems to me that it's trading a high upfront cost for higher efficiency - it pays off in the long run. But I'm certainly no expert in military spending; my knowledge of it is pretty much limited to Counter-Strike and "stop the war - it saves lives and money".
One: many sites don't use nofollow where they should, or use it where it doesn't naturally make sense (in an effort to shape their link weighting for SEO reasons). GetSatisfaction is obviously guilty of this, as the weight of their outbound links is counting towards this scam site. Granted it's not quite as simple as "Store below 75% positive reviews? nofollow everything" since that's almost as easy to game, but that conceivably shifts the intelligent nofollow burden from Google to GS. Google (and Yahoo!, Bing, etc) have far more resources to throw at that problem, and them fixing it will be far more helpful.
Two: recently, Google has started giving a (very!) small amount of link juice even to nofollow links. I'm sure they have their reasons, some I'd agree with and some I wouldn't. But that makes it even more important to use the context of a link in weighting it.
The majority of the sites were selling knock-off physical goods - it's quite easy to make a distinction there. I only saw one site on the list that was piracy-related, torrent-finder.com, although it looks like a number of sites were selling DVDs of pirated material which you could make a valid argument about either way (I'd argue they're like counterfeits; those sites tend to target ignorant people looking for a deal, not slashdotters with a bittorrent client).
If you're intent on blowing up the security line, there's no need to overcomplicate things with liquid explosives. The old classic couple sticks of dynamite strapped to the chest will work perfectly well, seeing that you have not had to pass through security yet. Metal detectors and x-raying bags is reasonable (assuming said x-ray devices are run by competent individuals, which is certainly not always the case), but everything else just serves to enhance the bottleneck, making it easier for unfriendly folks to cause tremendous damage.
Good riddance to optical drives. Outside of spending a few minutes trying to get a Playstation emulator working, I haven't used one in at least a year - including an OS reinstall; I haven't used optical media on a regular basis since probably 2005. For the longest time I've been hoping someone will make an adapter which will allow me to swap my DVD drive for an additional battery, something that I haven't seen as an option since using a Thinkpad Ultrabay probably fifteen years ago. If Apple finally does this across their entire laptop line rather than just the Airs, so much the better.
99% of the time, you have no need to get at the task manager (by which I mean the actual interface to kill apps, not just switch between them). The only time I've ever need to use that was when Mail freaked out on me and forgot how to download messages. Previously I'd have to restart the phone, now I can just kill the app and try again. Just like how in day-to-day use of my laptop, I don't need to use the Force Quit menu. On rare occasion something goes very wrong, but by and large I don't need to mess around with that stuff.
Granted, that still means that someone screwed up (always Apple in my case - I've never had the need to kill a third-party app, though I'm sure others have), but as a general rule iOS does a fantastic job managing all of the memory management and whatnot so that I don't need to ever think about it.
"Hey Leia, I know you're already having a lousy day from the whole being Jabba's slave thing, but your metallic clothing is setting off the metal detector. Please step over here..."
Leeching? The original seller wanted to make a quick buck, so was willing to sell at less than market value in order to get a fast transaction. Your so-called leech invested his time to find a different buyer willing to pay a higher price.
If you're calling him a leech, I hope you don't have a 401k or any shares of a company you don't currently work for or otherwise do business with. Because buying a car and selling it for more is absolutely no different than the vast, vast majority of stock investments. You're providing someone with money now in exchange for getting more money later. Basically a multi-party loan.
If your idea of a free market is "burn all the competition's first aid kits if there is a hurricane, and sell your own at a premium", this is pretty much it. If you're a scalper: FUCK YOU
Uh, no. This would be buying all of the first aid kits available and selling them at a premium. When making that kind of analogy, you're only allowed to change the noun, not the verb.
And yet people still pay the higher price. Scalping nets out to be third-party market optimization, even if the whole process is illegal or at best unethical.
Fair? Of course not. But nobody forced you to open your wallet either - seeing a concert or a game isn't a life or death situation. If this happened with something life-sustaining, then real problems arise.
But from a societal perspective, it starts to put a bigger wedge between the haves and have-nots. Entertainment/Sports/etc. becomes a industry that can be enjoyed only if you have a certain amount of wealth. In the long run, that may not be beneficial to that industry as the fan base drops.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Entertainment is a privilege, not a right. And while scalping may change the demographic of the event, it's unlikely to hugely affect the size of the fanbase (if anything, I think it would increase, as sold-events could cause a "I'm really missing out, I really have to find a way to afford the next game" reaction driving more, not less, devotion). Scalpers will adapt their pricing to what the market will bear, since any unsold tickets are an active loss to them - unlike for the original seller where it's more along the lines of opportunity cost.
Being cautiously optimistic, I see more expensive entertainment as a possible source of motivation for people to get better jobs and work harder so that they can afford to participate. Is that the reality of the situation? Probably not - I expect that it would just generate more "damned rich people" attitude, seeing that a large number of people with crappy, low-paying careers tend not to be the sharpest tools in the shed. And if I take that more pessimistic (and accurate) attitude, well, I wouldn't consider it a bad thing if we didn't hear about rioting after finally winning the world series. FFS, if you're going to riot, at least do it after your team loses, not after it wins.
Slashdot Mirror
The 3d-secure stuff is a web-based API. I don't know the details on what the DDOS affected, but if it took down everything on Mastercard's servers, then any website which has opted into using that enhanced security tool would have either failed to make the payments or fallen back to the less secure (and far more typical) approach of skipping that step completely. Assuming sites that a) handle their own payments and b) use that extended auth system were built right, it should have degraded fairly gracefully. Of course with CC processing it's never that simple and it depends on a dozen other things, but in theory the payment networks should have been relatively unaffected.
You certainly can try, but unlocking (to my understanding) requires reprogramming parts of the GSM chip's firmware. Jailbreaking is merely getting root access. Which allows you to unlock the phone, but you still have to know what you're doing - and if you screw it up, the phone is probably dead for good even if the rest of the device remains functional.
Even if you CAN unlock, do you really want to? In the US, your only frequency-compatible option is T-Mobile, and you often lose 3G capability too. It's probably much more useful internationally.
Unless your product is catering to developers, your customers don't give a damn what the code that powers your product looks like (and even if your customers ARE developers, they probably still don't care). Unless your implementation is at least an order of magnitude better than the competition, the first one with traction wins. Look at Twitter, and the dozens of twitter clones that came out shortly thereafter - none of them went anywhere because they didn't have the users, but I'm sure they were implemented better (since Twitter exposed a lot of the original problems). And yet bit.ly ended up killing off tinyurl.com, because it's a) 45% shorter to start and b) offers analytics on link usage which really did make it an order of magnitude more useful than what it replaced.
At least, that's the case for startups and new ideas. When your idea is to win the Netflix challenge and hit the million dollar payoff, then it's 100% down to implementation.
In case you haven't been to an airport (or anywhere else with a complete disregard for reasonable privacy expectations) recently, it's actually an extremely valid concern which makes perfect sense. To suggest or believe otherwise is, at this point, downright ignorant.
That's not to say it WILL happen, but it is absolutely a legitimate concern. I would be very surprised if they can't be used as a black-box solution (e.g., the last 30 minutes of footage can be pulled) from the start. From there, it's easy to mandate the ability to broadcast signals ("for automating insurance claims", etc). Conspiracy theories and slippery slope arguments actually become quite reasonable with the precedents we've been setting recently.
I'll just apply to one of you, since you're all basically saying the same thing, and since you showed up in my inbox first, it's you:
1. If you're turning on your high beams so often you know how to do it off the top of your head, you either live in the sticks or you're doing it wrong. From your comment, you live, or grew up in, the sticks. Fine. I didn't.
Are there any cars for sale where turning the highbeams on is something other than pushing or pulling the left stick (the one that controls your directionals)? I've seen some inconsistency in turning on the low beams (and wipers, for that matter), but that should be literally the first thing you figure out how to do before driving an unfamiliar vehicle.
Also, if "a tree in the middle of the interstate" isn't visible in time for you to stop, you're overdriving your headlights. It's a well-defined term meaning exactly what you've described. If you're at point X and your visibility is to Y (generally from headlight coverage, but it also applies to fog), you are driving unsafely if you cannot bring your vehicle to a complete stop before Y. Unless your headlights are in absolutely terrible condition or you have appallingly bad reaction times, 65mph will not put you in that situation.
This is all basic Driver's Ed material. No offense, but it really does sound like you're not capable of safely operating a vehicle under normal circumstances.
I can get fake evidence on film just as easily as I can get it on a CCD. Just print out the retouched version and take a photo of said print. This has been pointed out several times already though I think others are overcomplicating matters, claiming that you need perfect alignment and lighting. But as long as people don't know what the original looked like (and if they do, the fake won't work), none of that matters as long as a viewer can't tell it's a photo of a photo instead of an actual scene.
Still cheaper than a teenager without an unlimited texting plan.
Sega Genesis 32x?
Somehow I imagine this is significantly harder to do with consoles that aren't cartridge-based, unless there's some serious bandwidth going to those accessory ports.
Not to mention death benefits, and the much less measurable but more important intangible value of a human life.
Of course, something that makes killing the enemy more efficient doesn't *quite* help with that unless you blindly follow the "us vs them" mentality (and to not do so is treason, I'm sure), but that's what you have to do if you're measuring costs to America.
In absolute costs, of course. Sounds like it will be capable of taking out enemy combatants in one or two well-placed rounds. Compare that to a bunch of lobbed frags, several clips of ammo and some luck, or whatever else the equivalent may take. Never mind the cost of replacing a soldier that would have been killed in an ensuing firefight (just to completely dehumanize things). So relative to the alternatives, it may actually be cheaper - or, at least, not wildly more expensive.
Seems to me that it's trading a high upfront cost for higher efficiency - it pays off in the long run. But I'm certainly no expert in military spending; my knowledge of it is pretty much limited to Counter-Strike and "stop the war - it saves lives and money".
Two problems.
One: many sites don't use nofollow where they should, or use it where it doesn't naturally make sense (in an effort to shape their link weighting for SEO reasons). GetSatisfaction is obviously guilty of this, as the weight of their outbound links is counting towards this scam site. Granted it's not quite as simple as "Store below 75% positive reviews? nofollow everything" since that's almost as easy to game, but that conceivably shifts the intelligent nofollow burden from Google to GS. Google (and Yahoo!, Bing, etc) have far more resources to throw at that problem, and them fixing it will be far more helpful.
Two: recently, Google has started giving a (very!) small amount of link juice even to nofollow links. I'm sure they have their reasons, some I'd agree with and some I wouldn't. But that makes it even more important to use the context of a link in weighting it.
The majority of the sites were selling knock-off physical goods - it's quite easy to make a distinction there. I only saw one site on the list that was piracy-related, torrent-finder.com, although it looks like a number of sites were selling DVDs of pirated material which you could make a valid argument about either way (I'd argue they're like counterfeits; those sites tend to target ignorant people looking for a deal, not slashdotters with a bittorrent client).
If you're intent on blowing up the security line, there's no need to overcomplicate things with liquid explosives. The old classic couple sticks of dynamite strapped to the chest will work perfectly well, seeing that you have not had to pass through security yet. Metal detectors and x-raying bags is reasonable (assuming said x-ray devices are run by competent individuals, which is certainly not always the case), but everything else just serves to enhance the bottleneck, making it easier for unfriendly folks to cause tremendous damage.
Good riddance to optical drives. Outside of spending a few minutes trying to get a Playstation emulator working, I haven't used one in at least a year - including an OS reinstall; I haven't used optical media on a regular basis since probably 2005. For the longest time I've been hoping someone will make an adapter which will allow me to swap my DVD drive for an additional battery, something that I haven't seen as an option since using a Thinkpad Ultrabay probably fifteen years ago. If Apple finally does this across their entire laptop line rather than just the Airs, so much the better.
Firewire is dead? Really? I wonder how my 5TB or so of external storage is accessible... I must look into that.
That wouldn't explain the drop to almost zero CPU usage when using a hardware decoder, unless said decoder automatically disabled the visualizations.
I assume it's kind of hard to sell something on the black market once news of you discovering it has reached Slashdot.
$12 was too expensive? When where you born... 1850?
99% of the time, you have no need to get at the task manager (by which I mean the actual interface to kill apps, not just switch between them). The only time I've ever need to use that was when Mail freaked out on me and forgot how to download messages. Previously I'd have to restart the phone, now I can just kill the app and try again. Just like how in day-to-day use of my laptop, I don't need to use the Force Quit menu. On rare occasion something goes very wrong, but by and large I don't need to mess around with that stuff.
Granted, that still means that someone screwed up (always Apple in my case - I've never had the need to kill a third-party app, though I'm sure others have), but as a general rule iOS does a fantastic job managing all of the memory management and whatnot so that I don't need to ever think about it.
"Hey Leia, I know you're already having a lousy day from the whole being Jabba's slave thing, but your metallic clothing is setting off the metal detector. Please step over here..."
Leeching? The original seller wanted to make a quick buck, so was willing to sell at less than market value in order to get a fast transaction. Your so-called leech invested his time to find a different buyer willing to pay a higher price.
If you're calling him a leech, I hope you don't have a 401k or any shares of a company you don't currently work for or otherwise do business with. Because buying a car and selling it for more is absolutely no different than the vast, vast majority of stock investments. You're providing someone with money now in exchange for getting more money later. Basically a multi-party loan.
If your idea of a free market is "burn all the competition's first aid kits if there is a hurricane, and sell your own at a premium", this is pretty much it. If you're a scalper: FUCK YOU
Uh, no. This would be buying all of the first aid kits available and selling them at a premium. When making that kind of analogy, you're only allowed to change the noun, not the verb.
That said, I share your sentiment.
I should note that I don't in any way support scalping - I'm just trying to look at the situation with a bit more objectivity.
And yet people still pay the higher price. Scalping nets out to be third-party market optimization, even if the whole process is illegal or at best unethical.
Fair? Of course not. But nobody forced you to open your wallet either - seeing a concert or a game isn't a life or death situation. If this happened with something life-sustaining, then real problems arise.
But from a societal perspective, it starts to put a bigger wedge between the haves and have-nots. Entertainment/Sports/etc. becomes a industry that can be enjoyed only if you have a certain amount of wealth. In the long run, that may not be beneficial to that industry as the fan base drops.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Entertainment is a privilege, not a right. And while scalping may change the demographic of the event, it's unlikely to hugely affect the size of the fanbase (if anything, I think it would increase, as sold-events could cause a "I'm really missing out, I really have to find a way to afford the next game" reaction driving more, not less, devotion). Scalpers will adapt their pricing to what the market will bear, since any unsold tickets are an active loss to them - unlike for the original seller where it's more along the lines of opportunity cost.
Being cautiously optimistic, I see more expensive entertainment as a possible source of motivation for people to get better jobs and work harder so that they can afford to participate. Is that the reality of the situation? Probably not - I expect that it would just generate more "damned rich people" attitude, seeing that a large number of people with crappy, low-paying careers tend not to be the sharpest tools in the shed. And if I take that more pessimistic (and accurate) attitude, well, I wouldn't consider it a bad thing if we didn't hear about rioting after finally winning the world series. FFS, if you're going to riot, at least do it after your team loses, not after it wins.